Reshuffle

Our small but mighty team has recently absorbed Matt Gibbs into our creative bubble and he's sopping wet and ready to go! He's joined some valuable discussions on the layout of Night Post and i'm very pleased to have his informed input.

Last night I attended a launch night at Orbital Comics in London. It was the UK launch of Catawiki, which is a purely genious idea and worth a look, even if it's just to observe all the very bizarre things people obsessively collect (like tea bag tags). They have a great comic's section, which is why our Christian was invited to do sketches and sign prints from his comic of True Grit.

I also finally got to meet Luke Foster of Dream Solver. Which was jolly (although I think I talked the living daylights out of him and he was pretty glad to get away from my Harry Potter related jabberings).

Anyway, here's a little pannel sketch for Night Post. Minus Postie and Pashley.

Screen Scream

Differences in screens are really irritating me at the moment. When an image looks fine on our Mac its dull and sludgey looking on my windows laptop. When its fine on the laptop, too bright and harsh coloured on the mac. Bah! Digital age my ass!

So if you have windows, this may look a little better :)

Colour

hmm.. so I had a bash at using watercolour which I haven't used in a very VERY long time. I hate this picture overall, but it served well as a little experiment, to help me get back into painting, to see if this method is appropriate for Night Post and to test different pens etc.


This was only a little sketch to play around with so perspective is way out the window.. but the main reason it doesn't look great is that its just too.. well.. green! Night Post is (funnily enough) set entirely at night, so i'm also going to have to get used to making everything visible, but also obviously set in the dark. Lots of luminous pools of moonlight and warm glowing street lamps I think. Plus I suppose everything will have a slightly blue hue to it. So too much green wont be my problem, blue will.

I've found that inking and then colouring knocks the black of the ink back a lot. Not too sure if I like it or not. May need re-inking afterwards which seems like a waste of time inking earlier. Or perhaps scan in the inks and then add the inks back in over the top digitally? ho hum.. haven't figured that one out yet. If anyone has suggestions or tried and tested methods they'd like to share :) please do.

There's little bits of it I quite like..


like these trees

And this small patch of pond water.

















Also, added the parcel in last min, just left it in pencils. Which I quite like, I think it adds more character to the drawing. hmmm.

but overall... definitely not decided on a technique for NP yet. Looking forward to playing some more and excited to find something which may look good!

Water, water

Been playing with different colouring and inking techniques for Night Post today.
I used to paint A LOT, but haven't done in a long time, not properly for about 5 years. So the prospect of painting a whole book was a little..

Anyway!
Got some practice in this morning with some watercolours. I've always been an Oils girl, so this was even more foreign. But I think it will work best for this story.

Going quite well so far.. I think?

Jenny G!

You wouldn't want her round for tea
It's scaly, stagnant, Jenny G!

Unfinished pencils.

Miss Greenteeth

A few character designs for Night Post's Jenny Greenteeth.

So far inclined towards top left.
Love all the beasties in this book :)

Candy

my friend Bruno, about a year ago, said 'make a story about a girl with Candyfloss for hair'.. and so a rough narrative has been rummaging around in my head ever since. Although i've got too much else on the go atm to concentrate on it, my brain was almost melting yesterday and so I needed something fresh to look at for 10 mins. This happened to come out of it.

Necks

I've completed another 8 "Miss Flexy McStretch" drawings so far this week.
Here's some neck stretches.
I noticed that my drawings for this project have become significantly more detailed as the project has progressed. These ones are stretches from an earlier set of stretches and so I attempted to make them a little simpler, which was alot more difficult than I thought it would be. Although I managed to achieve it somewhat in leaving out any detail on the clothes (folds and shading etc) but the skin and hair still looks alot more like my more recent work than the first lot of drawings.
oh well :)

Ozma

I've been gagging to draw Ozma since Return to Oz was on tv a couple of months back. Now i've got it out of my system.

Although not sure if its really how I wanted it to be. I think its maybe a bit too 'nice', compared to how I saw it in my head. Will have to give it another go some other day.

At Sea

This morning I read Ottoline At Sea which i'd been saving for a moment when I could read it in one sitting.

I just love the character if Ottoline. She is so brilliantly thought out and the whole thing is beautifully topped off with the artistic genius of Chris Riddell. I think he'll probably be my friday favourite this week.

Anyway, of course, some sketchification occurred. Observe:

Grit

I saw True Grit again last night so.. when I started this morning, this happened.
Just a very quick little digital drawing.
Intended for it to be like the faces on my previous post but using the characters. Yeah that didnt really work out as they're always wearing awesome cowboy hats! So the shapes didnt fit very well inside one another. I think every so often i'll probably come back to this idea with perhaps different films, different collections of characters (preferably without any eccentric headwear!).

Faces

Things that happen at night

Got about half of Night Post sketched up so far.
Just a little peekeroo at what its (very roughly) looking like so far.
Spending today on 'Miss Flexy McStretch' as we so lovingly call her, as i'm a bit behind at the mo.

Goggles

I miss having a costume to work on every month

m m m my sharona

Birthday present for my friend Sharon